Ruins of Union (Environment Art)

The Ruins of Union is a game environment project that was part of an assignment in my course at Twofour54 Gaming Academy, the aim was to create a game environment that would be seen from a First Person Perspective. So I set out to create a game environment that is in an outdoor setting and in a fantasy medieval world.

Concept Art & Mood Board

I initiated the design process by researching concepts and visualizations from other concept artists online as this would help establish a clearer vision of the elements that make up the environment. After settling upon what I would want, I made a composite of these elements with a simple sketch.

Once the vision for the world was clearer, I attempted to design a story for the world that would form the base for the design decisions made hereon in.

Story

For the last century the world has been in a never ending conflict between the five races, the Elves, Ogres, Dwarfs, Humans and the all-powerful Anakims. Humanity being one of the weakest between them are being wiped out and are now on the brick of extinction, something needs to be done to stop that.

A hero from the human race capital city sets out to find a powerful ancient sword in the forgotten cloud ruins which was once home to the lost civilization, it is said that this sword was what united all races in the beginning of time.

And so the hero has arrive to this ancient temple that is protected by a powerful force that blocks anyone who tried to enter it, only one who is worthy to use to sword for the greater good to restore peace to the world may enter.

Color Pallete

After giving the environment a story I began establishing color palette required to achieve the mood that I want the player to feel.

Level Layout

Once the research and design process was complete I proceeded with the creation process. However before creating any assets in 3D, a top down layout was essential. Therefore a top down sketch was made to highlighting the different areas that make up the environment.

Greybox

Using the spacing established in the level layout, I used primitives to lock off these parts in 3D space. Using this I tested the spacing using a first person camera.

Once the spacing was locked down, I started working on the assets that would make up the scene. This includes a modular floor, instanced pillars and stair cases. Starting out from the center of the level helped in ensuring that the outer pieces lock in place.

Grass

First off I started by modeling and texturing a grass piece, which I deformed to make different variations. Once that was done I started assembling them all to make three different group variations and from there on I generated three textures of the different groups.

After capturing the grass groups onto a texture I created nine variations of grass to populate the ground with. This was done with variations in the polygon flow.

Finally I used all the nine grass pieces and created a large clump of grass that I used to populate my environment.